Sadly, I agree with you on this. What's worse is we even trust that these are healthy dog food. Pet food recalls are also very disturbing because it goes to prove that you can never be too sure with anything you buy on the supermarkets or stores these days. They tell you it is safe and healthy one day only to find out a couple of months after as poisonous or can cause cancer.

My personal experience is with lamp marketing. I can attest that in the past decade, the quality of manufacture associated with premium names like Kichler/GenLyte and Stiffel has gone from impeccable to implausible . The factory-order Kichlers are still robust workpieces with steel weldments, brass castings and aerospace-grade wiring. But retail Kichler is largely outsourced, licensed or subcontracted, built with diepunched steel nuts on poorly seamed 1/8npt-32 tube, often failing to stand straight or assemble tightly when pulled from the box. See a Stiffel for sale? If it's new it's fake, the company went out of business six years ago and Norelco bought the name. They've experimented with making brass lamps in the grand style, but often content themselves with whitemetal and brassplate replicas ballasted with concrete — fodder for dumpsters.

It's this temptation to stretch the premium brand to cover discount/retail that tells us, item one, that Americans live more poorly than we did twenty years ago. We expect the same amenities we could afford then and often labor under the illusion that by shopping the same brand we're getting equivalent goods. It's what ought to be true, right? But increasingly the rule is that if you
can afford something without going into debt, you're buying an inferior copy. Only the upper middle class can afford actual goods and their distribution channel is increasingly decoupled from the sweaty masses (Mention "William Sonoma" to most Americans and they draw a blank. Everyone still knows "Sears" though).

The danger is that marketing decisions are made by . . . the upper middle class. They increasingly send their brands on a cost-factoring powerdive chasing formerly middle-class customers past the poverty line, having no daily experience with buying these inferior goods hence no groundtruth on what the powerdive is doing to the brand. At some point we're just going to have to admit that America is a shell of its former glory and try to rebuild something from that shell. Until then we'll keep finding Chinese wallpaper paste in our dogfood and concrete in our Stiffels.